ANTIBOY: A Beautiful Legacy of Music

ANTIBOY, a musical persona created by genderfluid artist Harry Hains, who passed away in 2020, has been immortalized by musical projects such as Good Enough, and Paradise, but that legacy has gained another amazing project, titled One Love. 

One Love takes the audience on a surreal journey through a psychedelic utopia, led along by Hains in a cherry-red cartoon space car. Hain’s legacy will remain this utopian world in which statues dance and everyone is loved and feels love, regardless of background and personality.

I had the privilege of speaking to Harry Hains’ mother, Jane Badler, and friend, Michael J. Saul, who animated the video.

Could you tell me a little bit about ANTIBOY and Harry Hains?

Badler: What can I say, he was a true original, Harry Hains. He came out of the womb like nobody. I was a little bit obsessed by him. He grew up in a provincial town, Melbourne, Australia; he was always very unique. From a very young age, he didn’t believe in labels. Terms like nonbinary, all the terms we use today so easily, did not exist at that time.

Harry didn’t understand why he couldn’t express himself. You know he just was very creative and very imaginative. He wrote poetry and created little horror films; he was just a very extraordinary young kid. At some point he really just felt the unfairness of the world and wanted to call himself ANTIBOY as a sort of rebellion against the idea… that there was no such thing as boy or girl, that we’re all the same, the essences of us are the same, so he created ANTIBOY.

He had dreams for a huge empire. It’s hard to explain Harry, that’s for sure. He was really beautiful too, he was magnificently talented, but he was a very troubled young man, and he had a lot of demons. He had a very extreme sleeping disorder… It’s called idiopathic insomnia, which caused him to have a lot of psychosis because he couldn’t sleep as a young boy or teenager. So that’s my son, the genius with the demons.

Saul: Well, the Harry Hains that I knew went on to become a quite successful model and came to LA to become an actor, and that’s when I met him. We cast him in my feature The Surface. He did a marvelous job in the film and we just remained friends after the film was over with. We’d see each other at parties and he was always telling me about the things he wanted to do including when he, you know, sort of developed ANTIBOY and wanted to do a music career.

So the tragedy was, of course, when we lost him then, in 2020. It just was devastating on a lot of levels, obviously. I’d already heard a lot of the music coming out of the album he was creating. Jane could talk more about this; she (Badler) decided to complete the album and complete some of the songs he had started, and that’s what led us up to this video. (Hains) was just this sweet, wonderful guy who was just always thinking about interesting things and saying interesting things, everybody loved him, everybody on the set, everybody in production loved him, and he was just an amazing person.

My second question is about the poppy imagery in the music video. I was wondering if it had any meaning behind it.

Saul: No, I suppose it’s easy to read things into that, but the truth is they’re one of my favorite flowers, and I have them out in my yard and such, and because they come in so many different colors and varieties, that was really my sort of interest in using them in the video. They do mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and they can just grow wild in these massive fields. I thought it was a very pretty image, a free-thinking flower, if you will. It has this sort of wildness to it, and the imagery seemed to fit.

I was also wondering if there was any particular message behind the surrealism of the video. It starts out with that red space car.

Saul: (Chuckles) I call it the cartoon car.

Yeah! And it takes you on this journey through rows of statues and flowers, and it’s very beautiful, but I was wondering if there’s any meaning behind that as well.

Saul: Well, for me, when I was listening to the song, and I had it on my phone before I decided I wanted to do a video of it, there are certain pieces of music, certain songs that immediately bring images to my head, and that’s usually a sign that I need to do something with them. It was like—In a way it was Harry sort of communicating with us, and the thought occurred to me, “I wonder where he is now.”

I pictured him flying through his own world and overseeing if everyone was getting along and being happy, and that seemed very simple and simplistic to me, but at the same time, I do like kind of psychedelic imagery, and I thought of kind of the world that I saw him in. So that was really where that came from, but the car has an interesting story. I don’t know if I said anything about this to Jane, but the car has meaning to me in that, in real life, Harry was a terrible driver.

Badler: Oh my god, the worst.

Saul: And one of the first shooting dates we had for The Surface, we were in the car with him driving, and we were on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu; that’s a lot of traffic, and he nearly killed us several times. We decided right then that was the only driving that we were going to do in the whole movie. So, sort of an inner joke with me is when you see the back of the car in the video and it lurches forward with exhaust coming out of the back, it sort of reminds me of how Harry was driving, but in his own world, he could drive anywhere he wanted to.

Badler: He really was the worst driver on the planet. It’s surprising. But can I just say, the image of Harry in the video is an image that was slightly altered but was an avatar of Harry, but was created by an extraordinary artist named Jason Ebeyer who is very famous. He created this image of Harry with this white, beautiful hair, and there’s a lyric video of One Love with butterflies coming out of his hair, so he’s sort of like Harry but more… not ghostlike, but more spiritlike, so that avatar was carried on in Michael’s video.

That avatar (is) Harry as Harry, but something freer. Because I really do believe that Harry is free now. Because he was an extraordinary spirit; he only wanted good for people; he created so much love around him and now he’s free. That video, to me, I feel the freedom; I feel the love; I feel this beautiful place, and it’s One Love, this place.

Jane, you said that there was a story behind the vocals?

Badler: Yes. Well, when we got the song, it was a demo, but it was never finished, and we knew we had to add a middle part to it. At that time, I don’t know if anyone thought of me singing the middle part. I was quite nervous about it because we were working with a producer who’d worked with Lady Gaga and Sia, and we were working with another extraordinary singer named Sizzy Rocket. I just kept thinking, “Oh, I don’t know,” and finally I thought “No, I have to be the one. I have to be the one to sing this.”

So we all got together, myself and Sizzy, and it was the most extraordinary writing process I think I’ve ever been in. We created that bridge in, like, an hour, that beautiful bridge, and really, all I did was say, “This is what I need to say in this bridge; I need to sing to my son, and I need to tell him, and it makes me very emotional, but I just need to tell him that he’s free, and it’s all right there. All of these kids, all of these people that are different, that are not accepted, that have a hard time in school systems, it’s just right there, that belief and that beauty inside you.”

And so it was not just to Harry, but it was to the whole world. And it just came out of us, and I thought, “I just have got to sing this.” Fernando Garibay was one of the greatest producers I have ever worked with, and he brought my voice to that, and I thought after that I can never sing with just any producer because he helped me create those beautiful vocals.

Saul: Of course, when I listen to it, I know it’s Jane singing, but when I first heard it, it was like a love letter from her to Harry, but yes, as you said it, it is to everyone that has these issues in life, our sexuality… our society, and that’s why I thought it was so beautiful within the context of the song because not everyone will probably know that story, but for me, it was extra meaningful. Because, in a way, it’s an interesting farewell, obviously from Jane, and maybe from all of us in a way. Beautiful.

Can I ask what the driving force behind the video and the song was?

Saul: Yeah, as far as the video’s concerned, it is, hopefully, a message to everyone who sees it that there is a way out, there is a way to be who you want to be, and you have to be true to yourself, and it can be a joyous experience. I hope that people hear the song and see the video and are uplifted by it, that’s really what I wanted to do, and sort of tell Harry’s story, but the song is so uplifting when you listen to it and I couldn’t get it out of my mind for months and months, so that’s really what I want to see from the video.

Badler: It’s funny because I had someone say to me that saw the video that they thought that it was very quantum. I love that word “quantum.” There’s a very well-known scientific guru named Joe Dispenza who does these enormous seminars with thousands and thousands of people, and he cures cancer, and people walk, that kind of thing. But he is into quantum physics, where things are beyond our bodies. They’re bigger than us on a higher consciousness. And I feel like that is what, that, somehow, whether Michael intended it or not, the magic happened.

There’s something very magical about this video with the music that takes you out of yourself into something beautiful and gives you hope. So that’s what I love so much about it, and One Love is about that as well. There’s a perfect alignment with the video and the song. It just about the fact that it doesn’t matter if we’re in a wheelchair, we’re black, we’re white, what color is our hair, what our gender is, these are all just labels society has put upon us, but ultimately, the essence of all of us is connected. And I think that is what Harry believed and that is why it is so moving to put this out into the world.